Three Minutes A Lengthening (2022)
Directed by Bianca Stinter
Featuring Gary Kurtz, Maurice Chapman
Release Date August 26th, 2022
Open your imagination for a moment. Picture in your mind a small boy, close cropped buzz cut, ratty clothing. The boy sticks out his tongue and nods his head up and down excitedly. It’s a very silly, childish bit of acting out. It’s not particularly notable in any way out of context. So, let’s give it context. The boy we are talking about is Jewish and he lived in Nasielsk, Poland in 1938. That year, nearly the entire Jewish population of Nasielsk were violently torn from their homes in Nasielsk and within the next 2 years, most would be dead in concentration camps.
An image that would be innocuous, charming, or innocent in any other context takes on an immensely poignant and deeply sad quality when you give it a context. This thought occurred to me while I watched the extraordinary documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening. The documentary directed by Bianca Stigter takes three minutes of film footage of Polish Jews from Nasielsk that was found in a closet in Florida several years ago and spins out the lives of people who could be recognized and remembered from this 84 year old piece of film.
Find my full length review at Swamp.Media, linked here.
